Heavy Rain begins with a sequence of domestic bliss: the player wakes up as Ethan Mars on a sunny day, showers, gets dressed, does some work, helps prepare the place for his son Jason’s birthday party, and plays with his kids outside. Part of the backyard play with his sons includes a mock sword fight. And because it was taking place in the game’s first chapter, I saw it as a tutorial, preparing me for ‘real’ combat further down the line. On the other hand, it was a sword fight against my character’s own son. Should I play to win? Should I lose to let Jason win? If I were to lose, would I have to replay this section to progress along the critical path? The answer wasn’t immediately apparent… so I defaulted to traditional videogame behaviour and went for the win.
Jason took it well, all things considered. So well, in fact, that I began to feel guilty for not allowing him to beat me. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) And that guilt was only magnified in the following sequence when Jason gets hit by a car and killed. Our last extended interaction had been the swordplay in the backyard, and I had selfishly secured the win for myself. This coloured my subsequent interactions with my surviving son, Shaun – it made me a more permissive parent rather than the strict or authoritarian Ethan I would have otherwise been. And it doubled my sense of shame when Shaun disappeared and I couldn’t remember what he was wearing when the police were questioning me.
Failure was also the defining characteristic of my ‘performance’ as Scott Shelby, at least initially. I accidentally left the prostitute to the tender mercies of her boyfriend when I selected ‘leave’ rather than ‘stay’. And even though I did just about everything right during the sequence in which a young criminal was holding up a convenience store, my overly aggressive verbal style riled up the crook to the point where he shot and killed the storekeeper I’d come to question. In an RPG like Mass Effect 2, my swaggering style would probably have secured me the desired outcome. Here, I pushed too far and had to suffer the consequences.
Part of what amplifies the sense that failure is more interesting than success in Heavy Rain is the way the developers pepper its murder mystery plot with banal activities: flushing toilets, taking sleeping pills, changing a baby’s nappy. Not everything here is a matter of life and death, which made me want to experiment with mistakes when the stakes were lower, almost as a way to provide my own comic relief, to relieve some of Heavy Rain’s otherwise oppressive gloom. Yet by grounding a certain portion of the game in these everyday activities, the developers created a terrific contrast with the game’s more tense moments – crawling over broken glass, driving against traffic on the freeway – allowing them to be nerve-wracking without being completely over the top.
Now, in many other games, I would have hit a Game Over screen and repeated the failed section until I succeeded. Here, I had to accept my failures, mistakes and errors in judgement – both large and small, dramatic and ordinary – and have them sit alongside my successful endeavours, steadily accumulating and subtly shaping my perspective on the events taking place and my own role(s) in them. All because the narrative structure is in many cases flexible enough – or gives the appearance of being sufficiently malleable – to accommodate a certain amount of failure.
This extends to the playable characters themselves. By having four leads, one or more can die without forestalling the player from getting to the end through the surviving character. Rather than a single, superheroic lead character who must ultimately succeed in order to proceed, each protagonist can be portrayed differently – both by the developer and by the player. One character can be heroic, succeeding every time he or she takes the stage, while another character stumbles and bumbles through the action. To err is human; for videogames to accommodate failure is divine.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.